Reflections on a Prodigy
by pinkfloyd1770
Summary: "He just can't stand to make anyone scream again." Shisui's expertise at granting a quick death is more the result of a child's futile attempts at atonement than anything else.


More Uchiha angst. I had this idea and couldn't let it go to waste.

* * *

Shisui is ten when his gaze slips past a person's eyes and into the network of their memories and fears, ten when he starts plucking at fragile strands with all the care that a boy his age would give a spider's web. He knows what the Yamanaka can do with their technique, that their clan head can sift through a mind like he would an eagerly anticipated book, though only with the aid of ponderous machines and trained channelers. But his eyes make it so easy, and he glides along the glittering paths, the wash of words and images and tremulous emotions ensconcing themselves in him as though he'd lived them himself.

Terror and elation, rank and sweet, blend into something he can't identify. He follows the foreign feeling and before him rises a rain drenched forest in place of a cramped, windowless room, the humidity wetting his skin and hair, a soupcon of iron and copper grazing his tongue. Comrades, her comrades, he knows, dead and broken around him, their blood already dilute in the rain. They're forgotten in the coming moments, when she clutches her prize to her chest, orders which should never have been written down.

And the jōnin meant to guard the scroll...

Shisui falls back back into the camp, his motion sluggish, like he's treading swamp water. He shudders and struggles, and he's free, suddenly mired in fog and the scent of pine. He can taste the blood now, the iron raking the inside of his mouth, pain flaring all along his shoulder blades, crimson staining silver, a dull roar growing in the air, ripping through his head, heightening, sharpening into a scream as Shiranui Yamato's innards spill to the grounds, as Shisui's jaw clenches, his chakra crackles like static discharging from a metal spike, and the camp wavers and blurs. A man's face rises as if from a lake, dark haired, light eyed and smiling, cloudless sky careening above him. A child screams and cries as she falls and scraps her knee, soft arms and hands wrap around his neck, he's rushing father and father back, and he struggles, caught in the web, flaying. He's crying out, shouting, snarling, every fiber of his body flooded with conflicting senses.

He's ripped away, by hand and voice.

"Shisui..."

He can't feel his arms for the instant it takes to snap the connection.

"Shisui..."

He gasps for air and his eyes are wide and unseeing, but he can hear, he can hear and she's screaming and he can't tell if it's real or a payment for using his eyes.

"Shisui!"

And the hands tighten around his arm, his vision descends, and she _is _screaming, eyes wide and vacant, face an artist's exaggeration of terror, and he knows. He's wiped it all away, husband and child, as innocuously as droplets of blood from his blade.

She still screams.

Shisui moves by reflex. He grips the pommel of his tantou, his arm snaps up, forward, across, and the walls are streaked with blood before her head hits the ground.

* * *

He's released from psychiatric evaluation a week after he returns to Konoha, his age, relative inexperience and clan name tilting the opinion of the doctor in his favor. He has no strength to contradict his sentence, and his record is clean, except for one innocuous line that reads,

"Potential to become interrogation specialist."

In his report, he spares no detail and omits no transgression, giving a perfect written rendition of Yamato's killer, from her eye color and height, to her village allegiance and the nature of her infiltration mission.

He realizes, only after he's completed the report, that his Sharingan gave its perfect rendition before he'd even considered observing the details of the memory. In a fit of dispassionate honesty unbecoming of his profession, he ads, in the personal comments section of the report:

"It's better that she died by my hand. I can't think of any worse fate than being robbed of your life and being forced to go on."

And she'll never have to scream again, he thinks, but keeps the words to himself.

* * *

"Why do you use a tantou?"

Itachi poses the question to him one day when they're returning from dangou, Shisui's treat for his cousin's successful completion of the chūnin exams.

"My father gave it to me," he supplies, truthfully.

Itachi nods and accepts the answer, thinking his attachment to his weapon merely sentimental. Shisui regrets the half truth.

His blade is compact and straight in place of a katana's long, bowed delicacy. It's dual to his newly achieved transcendence of conventional shunshin, the technique he's always been skilled in, but never so devoted to it as he is now, never the one he's spent hours, to the point of chakra exhaustion, to perfect. Other blades falter in its embrace, shattering at impact against bone as he slices necks almost pairwise.

He's hailed as brilliant, a genius, and maybe he is. Fire release is his jutsu now, the flames heating the air to the point where they steal the breath from anyone near them in a deafening rush, searing flesh and charring bone to ash. Every shinobi member of the clan is held to his standard, and Itachi, under Fugaku's insistence, sought his instruction in the technique.

In genjutsu he's unmatched. Even he acknowledges his superiority to every other member of the clan, Itachi included. It's an art. On the battlefield, he can create illusions full of memory and desire, their fidelity infallible, their victims oblivious to their approaching deaths. Again, Itachi approaches him, this time on his own volition, uncertain, terrified of the prospect of dealing out brutal death. And Shisui, for the first time since he left the academy, feels hope spark in him.

His feverish devotion to his training sparks his own father's concerns, makes the man pull him aside and ask if he feels the need to return for more evaluation.

Shisui just smiles and says he needs to live up to expectations, to his genius, to defend Konoha, and it's true. He holds the smile until his father shows him his back.

His smile falls.

It's true, but really, he just can't stand to make anyone scream again.


End file.
